


Only A Distraction

by Kastaka



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-27
Updated: 2013-04-27
Packaged: 2017-12-09 18:15:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/776486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kastaka/pseuds/Kastaka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not that they are entirely devoid of victors. But Victors from Three tend to be unconventional. In comparison to some, Wiress has a relatively normal Games...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Only A Distraction

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Iavalir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iavalir/gifts).



> With thanks to ollipop for beta-ing services :-)

No-one volunteers in Three.

It's not that they are entirely devoid of victors. But they tend to be... unconventional. After a victor from Three - more than any other district - there follow long years devoid of hope, until the Gamemakers forget, until they decide to mix things up a bit and keep the audiences guessing.

The victors do not bring much that Three does not already have. The Capitol knows that you have to feed your inventors and your technicians adequately; they know that Three must be docile animals, well-watered in their cages, lest they use their education against them.

There is no lack of food in District Three, then; only a lack of liberty; and with so many interesting problems to solve, who would notice that?

And if sometimes a genius or prodigy is taken from them, well, everyone speaks well of their children, don't they? 

It's not as if there aren't plenty more promising young faces where they came from. 

No-one volunteers in Three.

The children stand in neat rows. Some of them fidget, chewing on their hair, or twirling pens between their fingers, or engrossed in the excavation of dirt from their fingernails.

They know, intellectually, of the Games. They see them in passing, on the screens, just as everyone does; they are taught about them, as is mandatory, in their schools. 

But the most pressing concern is the boredom, and the waste of time, as the Capitol's host prances and poses on the stage; there is no fear in these children's eyes. 

Filled every day up to the eyeballs with the wonders of the universe, with science and technology and mathematics, the prospect of fighting for one's survival - the concepts of cold and heat, of hunger and thirst, of pain and terror - are alien and remote.

The environment in Three is always perfectly controlled. The only fear they have ever felt is the fear of lagging behind their classmates, the fear of academic failure.

And as victory in the Games is barely celebrated in Three, there is no chance here for meaningful failure, no reflection on their worth or intellect or character.

Some of their parents might over-react, like some people always do to the prospect of a loved one being... re-assigned. Mostly, the children are not old enough to understand what that means.

Still, no-one volunteers in Three.

\----

She hears her name, vaguely, though the daydream of circuit diagrams.

"Come on, Wiress, don't be shy," beckons the elaborately coiffed gentleman that the Capitol sends them every year.

And she feels the others subtly push her towards the stage, her legs walking automatically, following the cordoned corridor. She pays no more attention to her surroundings than she usually does. 

Reality is only a distraction.

She ascends the stage without looking at her feet, the pattern of the stairs stored quietly in her memory, keeping her from missing her footing. She looks at the presenter with an unfocused gaze to the bridge of his nose, as she has learnt to do to avoid looking directly into people's eyes.

The eyes are the windows of the soul, and she rarely likes what she finds there, especially with the enduring impression that people can look much more clearly into her own than she can look into theirs.

She shakes his hand as he tells her how much of an honour it is to be chosen, how well she is taking the announcement. She smiles absently at the crowd. Faces all blur into one silent mass of people that she used to know; walking talking mind-containers that used to be relevant to her.

They are no longer relevant.

She stands on the stage and calmly gazes out as the other name is chosen. 

"Kelvin."

Black-headed as the rest of them, but with piercing arc-blue eyes, a boy from the year above her steps forwards. He has friends, or associates; they attempt to lay hands on him, in reassurance or benediction, or maybe just for a final simple exchange of human contact.

He shrugs them off, angrily, and steps forwards.

She watches him carefully, without moving her eyes. He is still relevant. Her mind is gradually moving things over, making room for her new paradigm; she now has a new problem-set, and she will face it with the same ruthless pragmatism as any other problem-set she has ever faced.

And her new mindset tells her, as she looks without looking, that this person is an opportunity, but also a threat.

He glares straight at her, as he mounts the stage, and she lowers her eyes and gives him the signals of submission. Better that he underestimate her. Better that he feel that she is no threat.

But she holds herself straight, and relaxed, and tall, presenting herself as an opportunity, rather than a liability.

There would be plenty of time later for him to learn - just too late, ideally - that she would not die for him.

\----

Her family came to see her, of course, in the special room that was kept just above and to the side of the train station.

She had nothing to say to them, so she said the right things. About how they shouldn't worry. About how her older sister and her younger brother would do just as well by them without her.

Everyone did their duty. Her mother told her they would miss her. Her father cried a little in her hair. Her sister, grown beyond the concerns of childhood, bent down and kissed her cheek and told her this was one record she would have to set for herself.

Her brother just sat in the corner and looked dolefully at the floor, kicking the chair occasionally. He'd never been very talkative. He was probably just bored.

It was hardly any time at all until she was taken out again, and deposited in a carriage of the train with Kelvin and a lady who had a walking stick beside her seat.

The Games ran behind the blank look she kept in her eyes. Three's highlight reel. The axe of a Career Tribute from One, skittering across Volta's chest and embedding itself in her foot. The tribute dragging herself across behind the Cornucopia and under a tarpaulin.

Wrapping her half-severed foot; building a prosthetic that would support her weight, in the shadow of the great stockpile; bursting into a sudden and unexpected sprint when a chancer from Eight lifted the edge of her shelter, gathered supplies all in a harness across her back.

Lacing the treetops with ropes and caches; a rain of silver death from a cluster of branches; landing on the hideous mutated creature and riding it straight into the other remaining tributes, letting it do her bloody work for her.

"Where's his mentor?" is what she said aloud.

\----

Wiress had never believed in odds.

What she did believe in was preparation.

Few children in Three had any interest in the Games. Few had any time they could spare from their studies. But she had always known that for an excuse, and she had made time. And it was not so hard to get hold of footage if you wanted it.

Obviously she did not have the equipment of someone in Two, but the strength of Three was to improvise. And in any case, her voracious research into everything that caught her interest told her that such preparations were good for her life expectancy in general.

So the small hours saw her running laps around the tiny apartment she shared with her family, doing star-jumps and lifting water bottles, then scrap metal saved from the garbage disposals and recycling facilities. 

She was commended on her exemplary dietary practices in front of her class.

Food in Three was plentiful, but utilitarian. She was confronted, on this train, with all manner of delicacies; and she contemplated the strategies open to her. Overindulgence would not hurt her preparation much, and would send certain signals about her strengths and weaknesses which might be worthwhile in counteracting any perception of her as a threat, or a rival.

But the impression she was most concerned about was not that on Kelvin, who sat there brooding like a small thundercloud.

It was Volta that she needed to win over, and she would be more impressed by restraint, Wiress felt. So she carefully sniffed the various juices on offer, and eventually settled on the least sugary of the multitudinous options, pouring herself a small glass and sipping it contemplatively.

"He'll be here soon," Volta reassured her.

Wiress did not reply, but simply gave her a measured look - right in the eyes - which, to her relief, Volta returned with a look that Wiress took to be 'understanding'.

"He'd better," muttered Kelvin. To him, it seemed, Volta was weakened by her old injury; not strengthened by the way she still bore it proudly.

Good. He was her enemy, too. Better that he wasn't overburdened with wisdom.

\----

Flat on her back, Wiress stared blindly at the ceiling.

The backing track of her brain spun in a tight loop - you should be asleep, you should be sleeping, you need your sleep - but the other layers just would not stop for long enough. 

She knew that, at best, she could plunge into a nightmarish half-consciousness while her subconscious processing spun off wildly; drifting in and out of tangled dreams of branching possibilities. Everything was suddenly urgent; every stratagem needed evaluating at once.

Whilst she had known that she needed to prepare her body in advance, she had never felt that she had enough data to prepare her strategy in detail. She knew the rough outline; the mentors, the parade, the training scores; but she also knew how things were twisted in broadcast, how she wouldn't know how it went on the ground until she had someone to ask about it.

And now she had data, plenty of data; but instead of forming into firm conclusions it simply swirled around in her head, tracing dizzyingly bifurcated trees of probability outward into the unknown. Training stations, displayed competence, potential alliances, impressing sponsors...

...and any scrap of extra knowledge or muscle memory or other edge that she could get for the actual Game itself, both the moment-to-moment survival and the entertainment of the Gamemakers.

It was going to be a very long night, she concluded.

\----

Some things were out of her control.

Her designer was a traditionalist, so she looked like every other girl from Three, decked out in EL wire that hid her muscle in dark shadows.

She took a look at the Career types, but discarded the idea of trying to be in the Pack almost immediately; these were traditionalists, too, and they would have no trouble claiming to take her in only to kill her once they were off and she was outnumbered, to dispose neatly of another outside threat; she couldn't quite offer them enough to keep them interested.

And there are two other factions, counting out the younger kids who look like they're about to cry all the time, and the teenagers from Eight and Nine who have already given up and are alternately trying to fit as much eating and partying as they can into their last few days and just staring off the balconies in aimless desperation.

Seven, Ten and Eleven all have at least one reasonable contender each. Birch, the girl from Seven, seems to be the driving force; certainly she's the one who approached Wiress and asked her if she wanted to be in.

Rather hypocritically, she insisted that it was only Wiress she was asking, not Kelvin. But Wiress is fine with that, she thinks. Kelvin seems to have taken the fatalistic approach, although she's seen him try to talk to the young ones; maybe he has a desperate plan.

Then there's Five and Six.

None of them are much to look at. No signs of training there, no long-term preparations that would leave their indelible marks on the body; they move like assembly line workers, not like predators. But there's a spark there, a determination, in the girl from Five and the boy from Six who are old enough to be contenders.

They're certainly the more traditional choice, if Wiress allies herself with anyone. Three only wins when there's some fluke in the Arena, some way they can mix it up; Five and Six likewise. If there is a trick Arena - and it's not unlikely, it's been a few Games of fairly straightforwards setups now, the cycle is right for it - then the better education that they come with... it could be worth more than the raw strength of the farmers and foresters.

Not if they can't sprint worth a damn, though. There's a good chance they won't make it out of the Cornucopia.

She's a good enough catch for the moment, she reasons, that she can play both sides. While they carefully avoid saying it, not out here, not with the last vestiges of civilisation still draped around them like a blanket, they all know who the natural victims are, and - more palatably - they know who their natural enemies are; if they can survive the start and they can break up the Careers and they can find each other, only then (she argues) should they seriously start thinking about where the fault lines are between the mid-rank contenders.

The closer it gets, the more she thinks that Birch set the Kelvin condition as a test - a test which Wiress did not pass.

\----

As the tube rises, Wiress is intent on scanning the Cornucopia for items; rating by usefulness, distance, proximity to the paths of travel she predicts for the Careers based on their own ratings for items.

But she recognises that a small part of her, which she has been ignoring, has noticed the surroundings - the metallic, enclosed, technological surroundings - and started to hope, which she hadn't realised she'd ever stopped.

It is quickly drowned out by the laser-like focus she knows that she needs to bring to the next couple of minutes. Potential food containers have just climbed quite high on the list, tools are hovering about medium; weapons she is fairly sure she can improvise, if it comes to that. 

A moment to look over her shoulder and examine the available exits, now she knows they are not in an open space. A few brief seconds to survey the opposition, but she learns nothing new from that. Everyone is behaving approximately as she predicted...

There is an explosion.

...right down to the girl from Nine stepping off the platform early, in a premeditated and deliberate fashion. 

The hysterical screaming from the nearest children almost covers the sound of a second explosion, which she does not have to look up to know is the boy from Eight, given courage by the girl's example.

She can imagine the commentary now, the hysterical excitement in the presenter's voice as they start the endless analysis of the reasons behind Eight and Nine's actions - missing, of course, the most obvious conclusion: that their acts were an entirely rational expression of the desire for the cleanest and quickest exit available to them.

In her reverie, she almost misses the end of the countdown.

Now she needs to be in the moment. She knows she needs to be in the moment. She does not have much practice at being in the moment, but she moves there and she snatches up that and she sprints in this direction and she ducks her head under the bolas that the girl from One has thrown in her general direction, not breaking her stride. 

All premeditated. No reactions, just actions. She vaguely hears and catalogues the sound of Kelvin shouting "Wait!", of Birch shouting "Catch!", echoing above the screams and sobs and sounds of sudden violence.

It all falls away behind her. She speeds down the tunnel - and listens - her strategy changes depending on if someone is following her.

Someone is following her. They are small and light and not quite as fast as she is. She keeps up the pace around several corners until she is certain they are the only one and that they are starting to run out of endurance to keep up the pace. 

And then she swings herself up by her arms into a big air conditioning vent and turns to see who is on her trail.

"I can't get up there," says Oakum, the young boy from Seven. "But I brought you a radio. There was a stack in the centre. We can talk to Birch with it."

\----

It's tempting, to get used to someone having your back.

He keeps watch while she takes out the tiny set of screwdrivers from a side pocket of the bag and begins to fiddle with the radio. He explains the recognition signals that Birch has set up, how to indicate a message is true and how to indicate that it is a lie.

Oakum isn't sure the others will be smart enough to get it, when she explains the plan that she has just come up with. But she can spare no patience for anyone who can't keep up. Even if they would be useful. Even if it doesn't work or it works only partially and they assume that she has betrayed them.

It had better work, then, she guesses.

She sends a message. "Listen up, this is important, sisters." It's a lie; it contains a family relationship; that's the code.

Then she sends the signal.

There's no sound which will kill someone outright. But there are sounds that will do serious damage to their eardrums, and sounds which will reach down into their digestive systems and mess around with them, and sounds which will sear into their minds, and she sends them a full sequence.

It might not be enough to kill them, but every little helps.

Afterwards, they move swiftly through the tunnels and lift themselves into another anonymous ventilation shaft, in case someone has managed to come up with some way to track the transmission. There are no callbacks.

Oakum becomes resentful. He wants to contact Birch. He wants to eat. He is, as she predicted, a liability. She can't abandon him; he might find the others and tell them of her betrayal.

If she's going to kill him, she needs plausible deniability, and she needs not to be seen doing it. She needs to be quick and she needs to be silent and she needs to not to have obvious signs of violence about her afterwards.

She can't work out how to do it, so she sleeps lightly, curled around the food like a dragon guarding its horde.

It's hard to believe he is thinking the same thing - trying to get himself into a position where he can kill her without alerting the others, with a high probability of quick success, without attracting attention - but she can't rule out the possibility.

It's tempting, to get used to someone having your back, but she resists the temptation.

\----

The arena makes grinding metallic noises, startling her from sleep. 

Wiress forces herself to calm and attention, hissing "sssh" at Oakum's incessant questions. Paying attention to all her senses, she confirms that the noise of moving parts is coming from many directions, but also that they are in motion.

"They're reconfiguring the tunnels," she explains.

She is not surprised, then, when she hears footsteps.

In the absence of the sky, the cannons are strangely muffled. The dead are displayed on occasional flickering viewscreens, scattered around the complex. Surprisingly, the girl from Eight has not yet featured on them.

Wiress had carefully disassembled the first screen they encountered, an ancient design which she knew there was deadly power at the heart of. She was pretty sure the resulting contraption only had power for one shot, but it might be the vital shot.

She doesn't want to use it too early, so she takes Oakum's hand and begins to carefully back off; although she isn't convinced she can sensibly avoid this meeting, if the Gamemakers have arranged it for her.

The footsteps are still getting closer.

She is just weighing up the possibilities of running - making a little more noise, but getting away at better speed - and trying to walk faster - but she'd have to drag or carry Oakum, who wouldn't understand how to do so stealthily - when he makes the decision moot, by screaming and falling to the floor.

Wiress looks down.

Oh. That's Birch. No wonder he's upset. She thought they cleared up the bodies quite quickly, usually; so either this is a blatant set-up, or the enclosed arena is making it harder for them.

There is a muffled clang which can only be someone who thought they were being subtle dropping to the metal floor.

...or someone is actively using the body as part of a trap, and has been carefully staying close.

She turns her eyes towards the new intruder, careful to keep them thinking that they still have an element of surprise for as long as possible. Then they might make a vital mistake. She has one hand in the stunning gauntlet in its makeshift sheath and one hand on the long, sharp knife she had found discarded in one of the passageways.

"Hey, kids," says the girl from Four, a crazy smile spreading across her face, holding a 'spear' fashioned from a knife and a couple of lengths of thin metal pipe lashed together with wiring.

\----

She should probably have used the stunner - but instead, she just ran, screaming at herself inside for her stupidity.

Running took her back in the direction of the original footsteps, after all.

Oakum ran with her, but he was slower. She heard him turn and emit a desperate war cry, heard the clang of the knives he was carrying against the spear, heard his grunt of pain; kept running.

She rounded a corner and ran straight into the owner of the footsteps.

Kelvin was bowled right over; he had never had a very firm stance or much bodyweight to defend him. And suddenly Wiress was ambushed, by the two children with cloth wraps around their feet that followed him.

She tried to just keep running, but one of them got a surprisingly heavy blow to her left shoulder with a piece of lead piping, and the world rotated sickeningly to the right, her vision narrowed...

"Stop!" ordered Kelvin.

She didn't want to obey him, but the stunning blow and gravity were doing his work for him.

\----

"We had to kill him," apologises Kelvin, as she comes around.

"What?" she asks, groggily.

"That little boy from Seven. Think he was following you. Already had a couple of stab wounds, had gone completely nuts. Couldn't waste the energy holding him down."

"My bag!" she exclaims, trying to grasp at her back; letting out a defeated growl of pain as her left arm strained against the sling someone had carefully put it into.

Kelvin gestured wordlessly over at the boy from Twelve, who looks like he can't be more than twelve himself even though the training data had definitely had him down as fifteen, and the fourteen-year-old girl from Ten who had hit her.

They are eating Wiress' carefully hoarded supplies.

"We're going to die now," she says. In anyone else it would be mournful, but in her voice it's simply matter-of-fact.

"Why?" asks Kelvin. "Don't give up on us now, Wiry. We've got a long way. And now we've got you."

"What did you do with the girl from Four?" she asks, attempting to distract him from the subject.

"Nothing," Kelvin replies. "Screen said she's dead."

"Oakum did something useful after all," says Wiress distractedly, trying to prop herself up on her right arm without the world spinning crazily around her.

"I'm sorry," says Kelvin.

"Apologise for losing my food," Wiress cautions him, "or maybe my arm, but not for Oakum. It's what we're here for, isn't it?"

Kelvin's thundercloud scowl returns to his face, which had been open and hopeful until that point.

"I shouldn't have reminded you," says Wiress.

She means it, too.

It'd be easier to kill them if they thought she was out of touch with reality, too.

\----

Jemima's on watch, but Wiress lies awake, thinking.

Five and Six are gone. Seven is gone, now. Nine and Eleven died at the Cornucopia, with half of Ten and Twelve. One and Two fell for her little radio trick, and presumably Four took their chances then; now the girl from Four is gone too. The girl from Eight is still out there somewhere.

So is the boy from Four.

Otherwise... they're a large alliance now, four of them, so close to the end. And she's injured. And they're out of food, after the children ate every last bit of her carefully rationed supplies.

She needs to work out how to kill them.

Part of her is still suggesting that she just take Kelvin aside, and be clear with him - that they should stick together, as district-mates, and she knows that he's become attached to these children, but they're not Three - and both of them together can easily take the two of them.

But she thinks Kelvin wants to live, even though he won't quite admit it to himself.

And if it's just him and her; well, previously, it wouldn't have been a contest. Now her shoulder is broken, and she can barely move without the pain and dizziness threatening to overwhelm her.

So there are two parts to it. First, who can she take on her own? Probably only the boy from Twelve. Second, who can she convince to act with her? Probably anyone; she can think of arguments for each of them, to tell them how she thinks they are worthy of survival and to offer to help give the others quiet deaths.

No, three parts - the person she chooses has to be capable of helping her taking down the other two. Which is the reason that little Twelve there might not be the best option.

But she can't take out Jemima or Kelvin, without the element of surprise. And with it, Twelve might be able to get his target, too.

She takes the rearguard with the boy from Twelve as they move carefully through the tunnels, looking for Four or Eight. She can't make her move until those are accounted for, anyway - Four might need all of them, and Eight is such a wildcard at the moment.

Wiress can't tip her hand early, or they will kill her for their own safety; but the longer she leaves it, the more likely it will be that someone else realises and sews the situation up. Probably Jemima, she reckons, although she doesn't know whether being defeated by her in combat is making her overestimate the other girl.

"So, Twelve getting this far is really a turn-up for the books," she says, with false cheer; laying the foundations.

\----

Four jumps them from behind; she has to play her ace card, the stunner, that she was relying on to even the odds between Jemima and Kelvin and Twelve.

But it would have been no use to her dead body, she reassures herself.

Eight is nowhere to be found. And she can tell the others are getting restless - and hungry. And there is a glint like the eyes of the girl from Four in Jemima's eyes, as she says she will take watch.

Wiress 'sleeps' right next to the boy from Twelve, and whispers very quietly to him. Of how Twelve deserves another Victor. Of how this is going to be terrible, however it happens, and she's not sure she can live with herself afterwards anyway.

Of how Kelvin will gain little by being a Victor, because Three is already well-fed and does not love its Victors. Of how it's sad about Jemima, but his people need it more, right?

He nods, all traces of uncertainty wiped away, and for a moment she worries that she's picked the wrong target; that he is just as calculating as she is, that he's just been hiding it better, that hardship teaches you to make the hard choices to survive and to never trust anyone.

Then she is up in a flash - and her knife is at Kelvin's throat - and she locates the nerve and the artery - and she delivers one precise blow.

Jemima's call of shock and betrayal tells her that Twelve - maybe she should have learnt his name - has also taken the fight to his target.

She rises and spins and readies herself, although the movement has upset her shoulder again and she can feel the adrenaline and the pain warring with each other. Twelve looks up at her triumphantly, and she can see the revelation dawning in his eyes.

So she kicks him as hard as she can, trusting her shoes to deflect his knives.

He goes down hard, and she follows through.

She imagines, with a strange detachment, the shock of the viewers; the delicious shock that they enjoy so much, the reason that many of them tune into the Games in the first place.

There is a small whirring noise. She turns slowly. A tiny hatch has opened, a little way down the corridor, and out of it is coming a diminutive tracked robot dragging a silver parachute.

She tries to lean forwards, but the payback is catching up with her and instead she falls to her knees in front of it; which is more dramatic, anyway, some cataloguing process in her mind which is still running informs her.

There is a little pot of salve on the robot. She picks it up, opens it, sniffs the contents cautiously; then sticks in a couple of fingers in, and smears it all over her injured shoulder, lifting the fabric carefully with her third and fourth finger not to waste any of the salve on her clothing.

Whatever was in the salve, it's also a powerful soporific; the world contracts and her vision narrows, and she gently falls over sideways as she gives in to the embrace of sleep.

\----

She looks up blearily at the viewscreen once more.

The faces of the dead stare down at her, but there is a moving ticker that she wants to read, if she could just focus her eyes well enough.

Food and Water are available at the Cornucopia, it says. And there is an arrow-shaped background to it.

She considers breaking the thing apart and trying to recharge her best weapon, but another part of her mind countermands that order; she knows that her hands are clumsy from dehydration, and that would be an ignominious end.

Instead, she drags herself off down the tunnel in the indicated direction.

It is not the climactic ending they were obviously hoping for.

She has been camped out in front of the viewscreen for an unknown length of time; hoping the Gamemakers would arrange her final audience for her, and not wanting to use up anything of her final reserves going and looking for trouble.

Both girls drag themselves to within sight of the Cornucopia. Wiress is at least upright and walking, with careful, measured strides, only stumbling very slightly; stumbling is wasted effort, you see. The girl from Eight is dragging herself across the ground, salt caked across her cheeks from the part where she wasn't yet too dehydrated to cry.

Wiress ignores her, walks into the Cornucopia, and picks up a bottle of water. She sits on a never-claimed backpack, opens it with intense and methodical concentration, and starts with a few tiny sips; washing off her fingers with some of it, she also moistens her eyes.

The girl from Eight finds a backpack on the periphery, tears into it with desperation, crams her mouth full of dried meat and chews desperately.

Looking at her water, Wiress considers retreating. It's possible the girl has some reserve of final strength, with which she might kill Wiress, using any of the wide range of easily reachable weaponry.

In a few moments - another couple of sips - Wiress could quite easily pick something up and kill the girl from Eight with it, too.

But that would be more risky. Getting close to her is dangerous. Moving away from her is dangerous, too; if anything is going to provoke a last stand, it would surely be movement and the possibility of losing sight of her target again.

So Wiress just sits calmly in the Cornucopia, eating and drinking very lightly, mindful of the effects of excess food and water on the starving even though her instincts are screaming at her to gulp down as much as possible, all at once.

And she watches the girl from Eight, as she eats inappropriate food; as she finally finds a bottle of water, and downs it in one desperate motion; as she throws up her hard-earned victuals; as she twitches weakly on the ground.

She is still sitting in the Cornucopia eating and drinking slowly and calmly when the airship comes to pick up Eight's body, and to take her away.


End file.
